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Movie Review: The Ghost Writer

An unremarkable ghost-writer has landed a lucrative contract to redact the memoirs of Adam Lang, the former UK Prime Minister. After dominating British politics for years, Lang has retired with his wife to the USA. He lives on an island, in luxurious, isolated premises complete with a security detail and a secretarial staff. Soon, Adam Lang gets embroiled in a major scandal with international ramifications that reveals how far he was ready to go in order to nurture UK’s “special relationship” with the USA. But before this controversy has started, before even he has closed the deal with the publisher, the ghost-writer gets unmistakable signs that the turgid draft he is tasked to put into shape inexplicably constitutes highly sensitive material.

Why Did I Watch this Movie:

We went to go and see this movie, as our mid-month movie relax for Script Frenzy. It would not normally have been a movie on my radar, except that it was about writing, so we all agreed. Also it was at the cheap theatre, so completely within our collective budgets.

Reaction/Review:

This movie surprised me. I was absolutely hooked by it. I only have one complaint ant it was the constant dull this movie was filmed in. The colors faded, as though the world were in permanent rainy season.

Throughout the whole movie we are chasing a red herring. It isn’t until the end of the movie that the twist slips in like a knife to the gut. I was also remarkably pleased that it did not end happily ever after. Good guy finds out who the real bad guy is, and instead of the good guy getting away, he needs to gloat and then he dies. Had he not gloated and gone to the proper authorities, he may have made it. However, I think the adversary is just cunning enough to have gotten to him anyway.

There were parts of the movie that were exceedingly obvious, like when the wife clumsily seduces the ghost writer. I guffawed. It’s not that the movie is intentionally funny, but the quirks of it were. The movie did not set out to make us laugh. It set out to give us a whirl of a mystery, without the complications of tying everything up into a happy ending.

Final Thoughts:

I would thoroughly recommend seeing this movie. I was very pleasantly surprised by this and it kept me on the edge of my seat. I felt immensely satisfied with the story and its climax and it wasn’t atypical.